Monthly Archives: March 2014

Only 16 more nights for transients in the emergency overnight dorms at Boulder Shelter for the Homeless. The emergency warming centers operated by BOHO return to weather-based criteria for opening after tonight.

Yippee! Get the bums out of our fair city:

Boulder, CO Peace Commission — Wyatt Earp, Chairman

Transients will be gently encouraged to get on the RTD buses heading back to Denver, with fare paid by the Boulder Peace Commission, and each tramp will be given a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bottled water to-go. Dogs belonging to transients will be turned over to the Humane Society.

I’ll be checking out the new NoBo Corner Library either today or tomorrow. Of course, like everyone else who lives in the neighborhood, I would love to have a library within walking distance. But, I’m not optimistic at its chances for success; if BPL knew how to deal with problems created by the worst-behaved transients, they’d do something to make the Main Branch downtown more user-friendly.

Not quite. The administration has not revealed how many of those 6 million people have paid their premiums. If you have not paid, you have not actually “enrolled.” It’s like putting merchandise in your Amazon cart but never clicking “buy.”

Besides, the number that matters is not how many Americans signed up for Obamacare but rather how many previously uninsured Americans signed up for Obamacare. By that standard, Obamacare may be headed for an epic failure.

Recall that between 5 million and 6 million Americans lost their health plans because of Obamacare last fall. If the administration now succeeds in signing up 5 million to 6 million previously insured Americans, it will have achieved . . . nothing. Breaking even is no great accomplishment.

And let’s not forget: Many of those new Obamacare sign-ups are self-sufficient people who were previously paying their own way and now receive government subsidies for insurance. Creating government dependency is not progress — it’s a step backward.

The stated goal of Obamacare was not to move millions of privately insured Americans into taxpayer-subsidized health coverage. The goal was to cover the uninsured. That was the justification for all the chaos and disruption Americans have experienced — and that is the standard by which the administration should be judged.

The phrase “epic failure” is spot on. Continuing excerpt:

Goldman Sachs is projecting that only 1 million Obamacare sign-ups will come from previously uninsured Americans. Indeed, it estimates that the number of total signups will be just 4 million — not 6 million, as the administration claims — because “HHS figures . . . count all persons who selected an ACA exchange plan regardless of whether or not they have actually completed the enrollment process by paying their premium.” Goldman Sachs also anticipates that fully 75 percent of all the Obamacare sign-ups will be from people who already had insurance.

The administration faces a similar problem with Medicaid enrollments. President Obama recently declared, “We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion.” That statement is flat untrue.

The president assumes that every single one of those Medicaid enrollees is getting health insurance for the first time because of Obamacare. But according to his own Department of Health and Human Services, that number includes people previously enrolled in Medicaid who are deemed eligible for another year, as well as people who would have been eligible under the law before Obamacare. The fact is, HHS does not know how many of the Medicaid signups are “newly eligible” and how many would have signed up anyway. If HHS doesn’t know, how can the president know? The answer is: He can’t.

(Pinocchio image added by me)

What’s the bottom line? As Mark Thiessen puts it:

The Obama administration is so anxious for some good news about this law that if it doesn’t have any, it just makes some up.

Wheelchair Man was back in my neighborhood yesterday, briefly “flying a sign” on the corner of N. Broadway & U.S. 36 before passing out drunk on the wall in front of the nearby Mexican restaurant. After watching him closely again, I’m now convinced he’s a FAKER; the man walks better than I do, and I get along with only a trekking pole for support.

CU’s Norlin Library was closed Friday and Saturday, at the tail end of Spring Break for the precious little darlings wasting their parents’ money, so I took a couple of days off to enjoy sitting around in my north Boulder neighborhood reading and watching the world go by. And yes, indeed, the spot where I sit in front of the Mexican restaurant in the 4900 block of N. Broadway is literally a trash dump, thanks to the bums who pitch their litter (mostly empty beer cans and plastic vodka bottles) into the roadside ditch there.

Anyway, I was left entirely alone there yesterday — except for the Real People who live in the Dakota Ridge subdivision nearby, who took full advantage of the agreeably warm and sunny weather to jog, walk their dogs, etc. One lady passed by me and remarked, “What a beautiful spot to sit and read a book!” Bless her heart for ignoring the debris left there by the miscreants.

Shouting Joe wasn’t even around Saturday. On Friday, however, he’d started doing this new thing to irritate passersby as he panhandled on the corner of N. Broadway & U.S. 36: standing in the roadway, instead of on the median, and pointing/reaching out repeatedly towards the few people who cared to talk to him (most keep their windows rolled up because he shouts at ’em otherwise, hence the nickname I gave him). Even worse, he was holding cars up AFTER the traffic light had turned green, pissing off a half dozen or so drivers stuck behind in line; they will never give him a penny, and their righteous anger tends to make it more difficult for others like me who aren’t self-centered and disrespectful.

In the absence of the knuckleheads yesterday, I made $12 as humble beggar during the noon hour, then another $33 between 4 and 5PM. I don’t shout, I don’t dance around or march back and forth, my sign is tiny, and I stand on the portion of the median away from the oncoming flow of vehicles. Plus, I’m sober and dressed in clean clothes. Works for me . . .

I bought a novel at King Soopers to read on this two-day break: “Nothing to Lose” by Lee Child, one of the Jack Reacher (homeless ex-Army MP, drifting across America) series. I like the way this author writes sex scenes; succinct, in a single paragraph, with almost all erotic details left to the readers’ imagination. No tumescent body parts, no throbbing and thrusting, no moaning and groaning. Trashy authors like Sandra Brown should take note, and try the minimalist approach to lustful encounters in their own novels. Of course, the plot of “Nothing to Lose” was absurd, but it was simply junk food for the mind and I enjoyed it.

BTW, the character Jack Reacher is 6′ 5″ tall and 250 well-muscled pounds, so why on earth the skinny munchkin Tom Cruise was cast in the movie role is inexplicable.

I hate almost all movies based on books, the “Hunger Games” trilogy being another example. Here’s the actress who ought to have been cast as Katniss Everdeen (olive-colored skin being a big part of the character’s physical presence):

Boulder City Councilwoman Mary Young wants to know how feasible it would be to require DNA samples from dogs with city-issued green tags that could be saved for later comparison to waste found on open space.

Young couldn’t be reached Thursday afternoon, but in a note to the City Council’s “Hotline” email list, she said a community member made the suggestion, and asked Open Space and Mountain Parks to report on the feasibility of the idea at Tuesday’s council meeting.

In the “Hotline” message, Young said the suggestion was to “require a fecal sample when dog owners apply for open space privileges or when renewing their dog licenses. The city would keep a file of the DNA and any poop samples found could be easily identified, and the owner fined accordingly.”

Uh, Ms. Young, the problem in a nutshell is badly-behaved dogs which aren’t properly supervised by their owners. It goes beyond leaving dog crap behind. Years ago, while I was sitting and eating a bologna sandwich on a trail north and west of Dakota Ridge, a family of Boulder yuppies came by and watched as their LARGE unleashed mutt ran over and grabbed my snack right out of my hand. I was speechless. I instantly regretted not having pepper spray with me — for the dog and its moronic owners. I haven’t returned to any hiking trail since then, largely because of my bad hip, but the dogs and dog owners are also an undesirable part of the equation for many of us.

I’m not sure what that was last night at my campsite, raindrops or sleet pounding on my tarp due to the high winds. I managed to arrange rocks well enough that none of my gear blew away.

I found this item at King Soopers yesterday, discontinued as part of store inventory and marked down from over $6 to just $1.89:

There were very good last night in my burrow, and I hope to grab another box of ’em today before they’re gone forever.

More mindless cheerleading for Housing First (a.k.a. permanent supportive housing) in an article on the Facebook page of Boulder Outreach for Homeless Overflow. Naturally, I left a comment, copied below:

Here in Boulder, CO the Housing First proponents didn’t even figure in the up-front costs of building the 31 units at 1175 Lee Hill, nor any of the ongoing costs of staffing the facility, nor utilities, nor the cost of lifetime government benefits of different kinds to HF clients, nor lost productivity by people who become permanent dependents of the system — the list goes on. Plus, no INDEPENDENT audit is possible due to HIPAA; the HF advocates can literally make any claim they want, as they’ve been doing all across America, and NOBODY can verify such claims. What we can see suggests that HF isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: http://www.adn.com/…/success-of-karluk-manor-depends.html And what about the hundreds who are left on the streets now? Don’t they count? Are we to forget about them?

Housing First saves taxpayer $$$? Humbug — that’s a Big Lie. What it does do is provide jobs for social workers, case managers, substance abuse and mental health counselors, and many others who therefore have no incentive to help HF clients become independent.

I don’t know what to make of this study, but for those of you who are dedicated runners here it is: ‘Walk away from excess running, researchers say’ from the Kansas City Star. I suspect it’s like the conflicting studies about the effects of drinking coffee, so maybe if you enjoy a single cup of coffee before running, it will work out okay.

Scam alert at N. Broadway & U.S. 36: A longtime panhandler there, after an absence of a few months, returned yesterday in a wheelchair and raked in a lot of donations during the noon hour. He claims to have suffered severe frostbite in both feet this past winter, and indeed one of his alcoholic acquaintances froze to death in the guy’s broken-down RV, but I remain very skeptical. He’s never been one to drink himself into the sort of stupor where he’d pass out and his feet could freeze, but he does smoke as much marijuana as he can lay his hands on every day. And he did walk away from that spot yesterday, pushing his wheelchair, when he was finished. In view of the fact that this guy is one of the homeless people who ripped off FEMA after the Great Flood last September, I’d advise kindhearted passersby to give him nothing but granola bars. He told me the story of taking over $1,000 in flood relief funds from that federal agency (for gear he didn’t actually lose, making it fraud) and partying at a motel in Denver, going so far as to hire a couple of $100/hour hookers for entertainment. BTW, in order to help you identify him, he happens to be the only African-American panhandler you’ll see on this corner in north Boulder.

Look for me there as soon as next week, sporting a New York Rangers cap courtesy of my friend Terzah. In the meantime, I’m wearing a nondescript black cap.

There are only 21 nights left for transients in the emergency dorms at BSH, with April 15th being the final night for the season, and the emergency warming centers operated by Boulder Outreach for Homeless Overflow will return to weather-related criteria for opening beginning the night of April 1st.

The bum fights are breaking out all too frequently. On Monday morning, there was a verbal altercation with some rock-throwing outside the facility at 4869 N. Broadway, which moved over to the parking lot of Bustop Gentleman’s Club, before three Boulder PD vehicles (four officers total) rolled up and confronted the methhead from Tennessee who instigated it. The other guy took the opportunity to slip away on the 204 bus. Methhead was so overcome with emotion, he lost all reason and shouted, “I don’t want the cops here, I’ve got 10 pounds of weed in my car!” Methhead’s girlfriend was every bit as excited as he was; at one point, her anger became so great she did a sort of “chicken dance” while yelling at the object of the redneck couple’s hatred. He’s a Juggalo, so perhaps that explains it. Or not.

Then, this morning as I was leaving about 7:25AM, two Boulder PD officers were detaining a 300-pound Denver gangsta chick in the locker room inside BSH, who had apparently come to blows with a homeless man.

Lots of tension in the air, some of it mine. Once again yesterday afternoon, I was pestered as I was standing on the corner of N. Broadway & U.S. 36, by some knucklehead wanting to take over my spot. As it happens, this individual is formerly homeless and lives in a Section 8 apartment near downtown Boulder, CO. I told her, “No.” Even if the dipso has been evicted from her place, I have no sympathy for anybody’s self-inflicted problems. And it didn’t help her cause in my eyes when she mentioned the name of Drunk Brian as one of her friends; that loser has been gone, back to Michigan I hear, since before New Year’s. Dipso was at BSH this morning for the Free Breakfast, so maybe she is back on the streets, or she just can’t break the habit of grabbing Free Stuff from all of the venues catering to parasites — with no questions asked. Too bad she didn’t avail herself of the Free Showers with Free Soap, Free Shampoo, and Free Deodorant.

My trekking pole, which was given to me way back in October of 2011, seems to be on its last legs; the mechanism which keeps the adjustable segments locked in place has failed, so the end of the pole flops out when I pick it up. Irritating, more than anything, and I suppose I could fix it with duct tape. However, I’m considering getting something like this:

Irish shillelagh

It would be most handy for dealing with bums like the one I encountered yesterday around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, as I was reading in front of the Mexican restaurant in the 4900 block of N. Broadway. This idiot, who was intoxicated and bore the marks of a losing fight on his face, came up and asked me, “Is the shelter still open?” I said it was, knowing he meant BoulderShelter for the Homeless, at 5PM. He decided to lie down right next to the mailboxes for all of the businesses in that small commercial district, in plain view of passersby, and take a nap. I told him the business owners would call the sheriff’s office, and he needed to get up and leave. I’d NEVER seen this clown before, but somehow he found his way to our fair city. Who can say why he came here? ‘Tis a mystery, and he ought to be beaten some more, as far as I’m concerned.

I saw another bunch of ne’er-do-wells in the neighborhood about the same time: the Boulder County Jail work crew, who stole all of my camping gear and food back in December during my daytime absence from the area. This time, they were cleaning out Silver Lake Ditch across U.S. 36 on Railroad Man’s property; I used to camp right next to it, and the sound of water for irrigation running by was both cooling and a soporific in the summertime. I’ll try to return to my campsite as quickly as I can today, to make sure the work crew doesn’t repeat its thievery. You’d think that the BCSO deputies supervising these jail inmates would do a better job, but they don’t.

There isn’t much that shocks me in re politics these days, but I have to admit that this one about floored me:

Valoree is a classmate of mine from Lexington, MO — and she served as City Attorney there at the same time I was a City Councilman. (Read the page above entitled “How I Learned To Hate Politics” if you want to know what that experience was like for me). Anyway, Ms. Maycock was married to a man named Robert Long; as manager of it, he had embezzled hundreds-of-thousands of dollar from the privately-owned water utility in our small town, and after being fired was passing along proprietary info to city officials who wanted to acquire the water company by hostile means involving condemnation proceedings. Only a tiny portion of Long’s ill-gotten gains were recovered, after he lost a civil lawsuit and pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges of bank fraud. It wouldn’t surprise me if Long still has $$$ in a Swiss or Cayman Islands bank account. Now, Long’s wife (I’ll presume they’re still together) wants to be elected as circuit court judge?

The word for it is “chutzpah” — but being both pretty AND smart, Valoree has always gotten whatever she wanted . . . I’m embarrassed to admit it now, but I had a huge crush on the girl when we were just 13 years of age.

BTW, Long was sentenced to only six months in a federal halfway house in Kansas City, MO and five years of probation.

Looks like the Obama administration is so desperate to divert people’s attention away from the failure of [WhodunitCare], with midterm elections a little over seven months away, that they embrace the appearance of impotence in the face of President Putin’s bold strokes in Ukraine.

I’ve eaten so many of King Soopers’ Alaskan fish fillet sandwiches lately I should be able to breathe underwater by now, but even so I’m having more for lunch in a couple of hours.

Problem drinkers who drain city services and habitually wind up in jail would be banned from buying alcohol within Anchorage city limits under a new proposal by Fairview businesses.

Members of the Fairview Business Association pitched the idea to lawmakers this week in Juneau, where the Legislature is writing the state spending plan. It would cost $5 million dollars over three years, the group said, including treatment help for alcoholics.

The proposal calls for Anchorage police to identify the chronic, problem drinkers who are most likely to be placed in the city sleep-off center because they are too drunk to take care of themselves, are arrested for trespassing or charged with other frequent alcohol-related crimes.

As many as 200 people who met the criteria, which is still being determined, would be placed on a list and not allowed to buy alcohol at stores and bars.

“It’s almost the same criteria that they use to fill Karluk Manor,” said association board member Heidi Heinrich.

Heinrich co-manages the Lucky Wishbone on 5th Avenue. The longtime fried chicken and burger house sits across the street from Karluk Manor, which was the first “Housing First” home for chronic alcoholics in Alaska. Karluk Manor resident Gregory Jack, 59, was found dead outdoors Thursday morning, yards from the restaurant. Police have said there were no obvious signs of foul play.

(Read more about Karluk Manor, a model for Boulder, CO’s own Housing first project at 1175 Lee Hill, here).

Continuing excerpt:

. . . the no-sell list proposal is based on a similar effort launched in Green Bay in the mid-1990s. The idea of forbidding people from buying alcohol is sure to raise questions of personal rights and constitutionality.

“The American Civil Liberties Union protested the (Green Bay) list, arguing that denying people legal goods changed their legal and social status,” the Wisconsin State Journal reported in 2009. “But Green Bay continued the policy, saying it is supported in state law, which bans alcohol distribution to ‘known habitual drunkards.'”

In Janesville, Wisc., anyone who has three or more alcohol-related incidents that result in a police call within a six-month period is placed on a “no-serve” list for bars and liquor stores, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. People can protest placement on the list to a city alcohol license advisory committee.

The Fairview association is still determining what, if any, changes to state or city law would be necessary to create a “no-sell” list for alcohol in Anchorage.

This is a brilliant idea! It would surely make Boulder’s apologists/enablers for the worst-behaved homeless people HOWL, but so what? Their inappropriate compassion keeps chronic alcoholics on the path to an early grave.

Of course, there are some who would purchase alcohol at the request of those banned from doing so — but this is already the case with bums who are 86ed for the day from retail liquor stores here due to being pickled. (I hope there’s a special place in Hell reserved for such enablers). But, with a permanent ban in effect, I think the drunks would quickly run out of “friends” willing to run to the liquor store every day on their behalf.

AND, we must realize that it’s not only homeless problem drinkers who should be on a NO SALE list:

Zoey Ripple (Boulder County Sheriff’s Office)

George Boedecker (Boulder County Sheriff’s Office)

——————————————————————————————

You may recall that I’ve referred to myself as “the poorest man in Boulder” several times, because I don’t receive any government benefits nor do I travel around to all of the nonprofit venues which are giving away Free Stuff to anyone, no questions asked. I do visit Boulder Shelter for the Homeless for my morning shower and to maintain a small locker with a change of clothes, but if it closed tomorrow I’d easily make other arrangements.

I mention the fact of my poverty again, due to my befuddlement with bums who are much better off than me $$$-wise asking for my instant coffee at BSH, or a bite of my lunch of refried beans as I’m sitting along the wall in the 4900 block of N. Broadway. WTF? Lazy, good-for-nothing parasites who spend their monthly benefits from Uncle Sugar on cigarettes, booze, and dope expect ME to share my coffee and my beans?

Made with lard for extra flavor!

It ain’t happening . . . What little I have is MINE. Take your worthless butts back to Denver, or wherever you came from before you showed up in our fair city!

A few mornings back, in the day room at Boulder Shelter for the Homeless, I overheard two geezer potheads talking about the upcoming 4/20 celebration on CU’s Norlin Quad. They seemed to be quite excited at the prospect of FREE WEED and partying with thousands of other stoned idiots. Of course, they’re 3 years too late to participate in such nonsense, but I didn’t burst their bubble by telling ’em so. I’ll leave that to law enforcement officers who will be present on campus that day — 4/20/2014.

I’ve been wondering why transients keep flocking to Boulder, CO. Nobody who comes here is being greeted with a Hippie Paradise, and resources for the homeless are stretched to the breaking point, along with residents’ and city officials’ patience. The bums/”travelers”/Rainbow Family members must be relying on sources of information as out-of-date as the ones the geezer potheads above did.

No snow overnight, but it was cold and windy when I poked my head out from under the tarp around 5:10AM. Recent predictions of rain mixed with snow haven’t come true, so perhaps we’re in for a dry year.

It was slow going on the corner of N. Broadway & U.S. 36 yesterday afternoon. It took me 4 hours to make $31, when I can usually do better than $10 per hour, sometimes much better. At least I was left alone in the neighborhood; no Denver King or Shouting Joe bugging me. In any case, I’ve treated myself to Price’s Pimiento Cheese Spread and a loaf of potato bread from King Soopers.